Ithra the Sila came up out of the Between into the lowest passage of the Cave with a different temperature in each hand.
In her left hand, wrapped in a square of undyed cotton, was the jewel. It was cold. It had been cold all the way from Damascus, through the outer galleries of the believing jinn there and down through the layers and across, and it had not warmed once against her palm. It never would. A jewel was cold in the human world and it stayed cold, and after its owner died its signature lay still in it like water in a sealed jar.
In her right hand, in a twist of blue cloth torn from a refugee's scarf, was the ember.
It was about the length of the first joint of her thumb, dark, smooth, a little warmer than the air of the passage. It did not glow or carry any message. Naim had left it on the sand near the border when his fire stopped, and it had lain in the sand where it formed until Soren picked it up. In the gallery under Damascus he had put both into her hands, the jewel out of his coat and the ember out of his fist, and asked her to take them home.
She had carried the two of them separately since Damascus, one in each hand, because she had found on the first night that she did not like them touching.
She dropped the human shape at the foot of the passage. She had worn it so long in the outer galleries, for the refugees, that she felt the grey scarf go off her head like a weight lifted. The Cave's cold came up through her at once. She knew this stone. She had been sitting on it, on and off, for nine hundred years.
The Cave had changed while she was gone.
She went up through the outer galleries first, because that was the way to the deep wall. The humans were gone. The long floor where three hundred of them had slept was bare stone, swept, with the black rings of their small fires still on it. In a crack near the wall someone had left a plastic comb.
In their place were jinn. Ithra counted forty in the first gallery alone and stopped counting. They sat along the walls in ones and twos, very still, in their own shapes, and most of their shapes were thin and grey and faintly drawn, as if a year of wearing other faces had rubbed out the edges of their own. One of them, a young Jann, looked up as she passed and then looked away quickly. Another was asleep, or doing what jinn do for sleep, curled on the stone with its arms round its knees.
She knew what they were without being told. She read the weave of the place as she read everything, and the weave said that the leader had opened the outer door to the road's jinn and let in those who came in their own shapes. She noted it, and neither approved nor disapproved. It was his door.
By the eastern seep, someone was humming.
She stopped. The water still came down the rock there in its thin skin and filled the stone lip and ran over, and beside it, sitting with his back to the wall and his eyes shut, was Tamar. He was thinner than he had been. There was a badly healed cut on his forearm. The hum had no words and no tune that anyone could name, and it filled the gallery the way it always had, low, steady, like water finding its level.
Ithra had looked at the eastern seep four times during Kael's rite and told Soren so. She had been right about where Soren was looking. She had been wrong about what it meant, and so had he.
She stood a moment longer and listened. Then she went on, and did not interrupt him.
The unrecovered hall was colder than the rest of the Cave. It always had been. The niches went up the deep wall in uneven rows, each one cut to the size of what it held: a jewel, a token, a carved stone, a few with nothing in them and only a name marked on the lip. The keeper's lamp burned at the foot of the wall.
The keeper was there. He was always there. He was older than the Cave's oldest tunnel and bent with it, and he turned his head toward her as she came in, and then toward her two closed hands.
"You've brought the boy back," he said.
"His jewel."
"That's what I said."
Kael's niche was at the height of a standing Jann's shoulder, small, cut neat. It was empty. The name was marked on the lip in the old script. Naim had asked for the jewel the week Soren brought him into the Cave, and the keeper had given it to him, because a jewel goes with its kin. He had carried it in his coat as far as the broken bridge.
She unwrapped the cotton and set the jewel in the niche. It sat there green and small and cold in the lamplight, where it had sat for the forty days and for a long time after.
"And the other," the keeper said.
She opened her right hand. The blue cloth lay on her palm with the warm weight in it.
"His father," she said. "Naim. There's no niche for him. Soren never let one be cut."
"No," the keeper said. "He never did."
He took the lamp and moved along the wall and lifted it.
Beside Kael's niche, a hand's width to the left, there was another. It was larger. It was cut in the same neat way, and old, older than Kael's by a long time, with the faint dust of decades in the bottom of it. There was no name on its lip. There was nothing on the lip at all.
"When?"
"After the pass fell. When the war ended and he wasn't sent back with the others." The keeper looked at the niche as if it were a piece of his own work he had been waiting a long time to see used. "Soren came down here and told me not to cut it. He said Naim wasn't dead. He said a niche was an answer, and he didn't have one."
"And you cut it."
"I'm the keeper. I cut it the same night. I didn't mark it." He lowered the lamp. "I thought someday he'd have an answer and want somewhere to put it."
Ithra looked at the empty niche for a long time. Then she looked at the ember in her palm.
She did not put it in. She closed her hand on it again.
"It isn't yours to set," the keeper said.
"I know."
"Nor mine. The leader sets the anchor and the leader says the name. Once. The rite wants his voice." He held the lamp a little higher, so she could see the blank lip of the niche. "Go and get him."
She went up through the Cave to the gallery where Soren sat.
His place was empty. The stone where he had sat through eight centuries of disputes and petitions and one long night of humming was cold to her hand. There was no trace of his stillness left in it. That meant he had not sat there today, or yesterday.
She went to his chamber. The heavy door stood open. The lamp was out. On the desk a deputy's summary lay where it had been put down, squared to the edge, unread.
In the outer room two deputies were working at a table. They stood up when she came in.
"Where is he?"
The older one glanced at the younger. They had both been with Soren for two hundred years, and she saw that neither of them wanted to be the one to say it.
"He went out through the outer door before dawn yesterday," the older one said. "The gallery elder drew the bars for him. He didn't say where he was going." He hesitated. "He didn't say when he'd be back. He's never once not said."
Ithra went to the outer door. The gallery elder was there, with his hand on the cold of the first bar, and he shook his head before she asked.
She stood at the top of the long trough of the passage with the warm ember closed in her right hand. Below her, the Cave was full of the returned and the humming. Before her the fold of the door was shut.
Soren was not in the Cave.